Solar plus battery and some wind now beats everything else by such a wide margin it boggles my mind we’re even still talking about, or contemplating anything else.
By the time you finish reading this, solar panels got cheaper
Solar plus battery and some wind now beats everything else by such a wide margin it boggles my mind we’re even still talking about, or contemplating anything else.
By the time you finish reading this, solar panels got cheaper
Only in some regions that’s enough. A lot of regions have winters where solar output is greatly diminished and wind can stop for days. Batteries are too expensive to store electricity for days to weeks. On top of that you have higher demand if you have electrified space heating.
In virtually all regions.
I’m in Canada in a tight valley with tons of snow. The 7.2kw on my roof will profit me $25k-$30k over their life.
It works very well, even here
Humanity actually has millennia of experience with solar energy, we just call it agriculture. Plants literally are natural solar panels. And you know what all this experience tells us? It varies from place to place, like, a lot. In some places it works nice and in some places it just doesn't.
> Solar plus battery and some wind now beats everything else
Except that they don't.
Why do you think new datacenters are using natgas turbines and not wind+solar?
Because they don’t want to wait for a grid connection that can take years and they need backup generation capacity anyways.
You’ll see them all connecting to the grid in the following years simply because it’s cheaper
Indeed. And the problem with grid connections is that the grid can't carry arbitrary streams of energy. So you can't just connect a bunch of remote panels to the grid and YOLO it on the scale of the large datacenters.
This problem does not go away, though. It's still an issue for renewable generation, especially for northern areas.
Physical footprint fits in limited available space, well understood turnkey commercial off the shelf solution, and lack of grid scale flexibility/redundancy to best exploit available capacity at different times of day/year.
Honestly a lot of different reasons. One they can put natgas on a private disconnected grid direct on the same property.
The other big ones is states ignoring the environmental rules of all the negative side effects of said generation.
DC's better be careful or any government change and their choices now will bite them in the ass.
Because behind-the-meter generation bypasses many municipal permitting processes and now also skips NEPA review. As diesel keeps climbing it'll get more expensive to truck fuel in and you'll start to see operators begging for the grid connections they scoffed at before.
But the volume of solar panels you'd need and especially the volume of batteries you'd need don't exist, nor is the supply there for anything but a gradual build-out.